Speaker: Higher education in crisis from bad ideas

Saturday

Nov 18, 2017 at 1:00 PM

‘Solution is the liberal arts’

David Panian Daily Telegram News Editor @lenaweepanian

ADRIAN — Higher education is in crisis from decades of turning from God’s truth to bad ideas, and the classic liberal arts are the solution, a Christian university president told an audience Friday at a fundraiser for a new historical marker in Adrian.

Oklahoma Wesleyan University President Everett Piper was the featured speaker for the event as the Lenawee County Republican Party works to raise $9,500 to place a historical marker on the county’s role in the formation of the national Republican Party. The marker will be like others placed in downtown Adrian. It will present the roles of Adrian residents Charles Croswell, who would later become governor of Michigan, and Fernando Beaman, who later became a U.S. representative, in the first party convention in Jackson in 1854.

Piper, who was introduced Friday at the Croswell Opera House’s James E. Van Doren Studio by U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Tipton, grew up in Hillsdale and, after working for a short time at Hillsdale Tool and Manufacturing, was encouraged by a co-worker to go to college. He chose Spring Arbor University because it was the closest Christian university.

That led him to a career in higher education. He became president of Oklahoma Wesleyan in Bartlesville in 2002.

Piper said being a Christian and a conservative is the background for how he became well-known.

“As a conservative, I’m more classically liberal than my left-of-center counterparts,” he said.

He paraphrased Thomas Jefferson by saying his conservatism is based in the “self-evident truths that are endowed by our creator” and the liberal arts as taught when Oxford University in England was founded to encourage a free society and a free church.

Self-evident truths, such as slavery or rape being bad, are ideas that can’t be empirically tested but are knowable through common sense and “the truth of God that is written on every human heart,” Piper said.

He said in the liberal arts, good arguments of ideas are enjoyed, as long as there are rules and boundaries.

Piper gained notoriety two years ago when a column he wrote for the Bartlesville newspaper, “This is not a day care. It’s a university!,” went viral. The column was inspired by a student’s complaint that he had been victimized by a homily during a campus chapel service on 1 Corinthians 13.

“It appears this young scholar felt offended because a homily on love made him feel bad for not showing love. In his mind, the speaker was wrong for making him, and his peers, feel uncomfortable,” he wrote in the column.

He then went on to discuss “trigger warnings” and “safe places,” saying a university is “a place to learn: to learn that life isn’t about you, but about others; that the bad feeling you have while listening to a sermon is called guilt; that the way to address it is to repent of everything that’s wrong with you rather than blame others for everything that’s wrong with them. This is a place where you will quickly learn that you need to grow up!”

Most of the response to the column was positive, he said. The few negative responses came from churches saying he had hurt the student’s feelings.

The column resonated, Piper said, because he was the person who took a stand.

“I was the guy who said, ‘Stop it,’ ” he said.

But, he added, it was something his father would have said.

In universities — and society — it should be OK to have debates about ideas, and that good ideas would prevail over bad ideas, he said. But too often now, certain ideas are shouted down without debate, with modern liberals demanding conformity.

“This is nonsense,” Piper said, calling the idea that “you must believe like we believe or we will crush you” ideological fascism.

“It’s antithetical to classical liberalism,” he said. “In the end, you are controlled rather than released.”

He gave the University of California’s flagship campus in Berkeley as an example. He said it started calling itself the birthplace of free speech in the 1960s, but now conservative commentators such as Ben Shapiro and Milo Yiannopolis aren’t welcome there.

Piper said he and Yiannopolis are “miles apart” ideologically, but “he would have more freedom on my campus” than at Berkeley.

The current anti-free speech climate on many campuses is the result of “the lousy ideas we’ve taught for decades,” such as narcissism and nihilism.

“The solution is the liberal arts, the assumption of liberty and freedom,” Piper said.

A free society needs rules, he said, and liberty and freedom are derived from the Ten Commandments.

“If you get rid of the big laws of God, you don’t get liberty,” Piper said. Instead, you get “reams of little laws” passed by legislatures “to control a culture that’s lost its mind.”

Ideas define culture, he said, ideas are made of words and words have meanings.

He criticized the redefinition of marriage as something other than between a man and a woman.

“We can’t even define what a woman is anymore,” he said, turning to the issue of transgender people.

Piper said the U.S. Department of Education sent Oklahoma Wesleyan a letter saying it had to give transgender people equal access to programs as men and women under the Title IX law. He summarized the university’s reply as, “No.”

“We believe in the biological fact of the female,” he said. “How can you give women equal access if they’re a myth?”

The federal government’s response was to grant Oklahoma Wesleyan a waiver from the new requirement.

“This is pro-woman, and I’m proud of it,” Piper said.

He encouraged leaders to “hang on to your words.”

“Silence in the face of evil is evil itself,” he said, quoting German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Piper also encouraged people to not send their children to colleges and universities “that teach this pablum.”

“We’ve been teaching self-absorption and nihilism, and we’re surprised to see self-absorption and nihilism in our kids?” he said.

While state universities are notable for these problems, he said many Christian colleges are “spineless. They’re jellyfish.”

He gave Oklahoma Wesleyan, Cedarville College in Ohio, Grace College in Indiana and the College of the Ozarks in Missouri as examples of schools that have resisted modern liberal teaching.

If parents can’t send their children to one of those schools or if their teenagers attend a public school district, Piper encouraged parents to send their kids to camps run by Summit Ministries or Worldview Academy before they head off to college, preferably one that encourages a Judeo-Christian ethic.

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